A Guide to Navajo Sandpaintings provides the best introduction to the religious images created by Navajo medicine men as part of traditional curing ceremonies. These carefully prescribed designs depict ancient Navajo gods and heroes to whom medicine men appeal to help restore their patients to harmony. Every shape and color has to be just right lest irremediable harm come to medicine man and his patient. 
Although many ancient sandpaintings designs and their accompanying chants have been lost to time, others remain a vital part of Navajo religious practice and have emerged as a dynamic art form. Navajo artists now incorporate heroes, gods, traditional design icons, and landscape features from their homeland into stunning, contemporary. 
In A Guide to Navajo Sandpaintings, noted Native American arts authority Mark Bahti describes the history and development of this healing art. For each of the more than sixty individual sandpaintings included, Bahti provides the legend from which the design originated. He also explains how contemporary artists honor the traditions of their elders while breaking new ground for this fascinating art form.

Navajo Sandpainting Art

Arts & Photography

Bahti, Mark

Joe, Eugene Baatsoslanii

Branson, O. T.

Photography & Video

Treasure Chest Pubns

A Guide to Navajo Sandpaintings

Baatsoslani Joe, Eugene

History & Criticism

Rio Nuevo Pub

A superlative guide to traditional and contemporary Navajo sandpaintings.Few art forms are more significant to Navajo religious beliefs than the sandpainting, or ikaah. Sandpaintings play a major role in Navajo ceremonies, assisting healers to cure ailments by summoning the gods’ aid to restore harmony to both mind and body. In this clear, brief, yet profoundly informed text, Mark Bahti reviews the history of the sandpainting from its original, and continuing, sacred purpose to the purely artistic creations produced by some sand painters for sale today. With his collaborator, Eugene Baatsoslanii Joe, Bahti explains the meanings of the images and colors in sandpaintings and tells some of the traditional stories that they represent. Navajo Sandpaintings will enlighten both the amateur and the connoisseur of Navajo art. 67 color illustrations

Navajo Sandpaintings (Revised)

Rio Nuevo Publishers

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Books by Joe, Eugene Baatsoslanii